The Chosen One

2

Washington, DC, Monday March 20, 08.07

There was no time to visit the bathroom: she had been summoned to see him ‘right away’. But there was no way in the world she could go to the Residence looking like this. Maggie swung open the door to the ladies’, praying she would run into no one that she would have to speak to.

Shit.

Tara MacDonald, Director of Communications, African-American mother of four and undisputed matriarch, first of the Baker campaign and now of the Baker White House – coiffed and confident in her midlife prime, coming out of the stalls and checking her make-up.

‘Hi there, Maggie, how you doing, sweetheart?’

Maggie froze, reluctant to take up her position in front of the vanity mirror. Lamely, she ducked her head and began to wash her hands.

‘I’m OK.’

‘You seem a little, I don’t know, agitated.’

Maggie turned to MacDonald with a harried attempt at a smile. ‘I’ve just been summoned. To the Residence. I thought I’d better…’ she nodded towards the mirror, ‘…you know, make myself presentable.’

The instant change in Tara’s expression – as if her smile muscles had been suddenly severed – told Maggie she’d made a mistake.

The older woman pursed her lips. ‘That right? The Residence. That’s quite an honour.’

‘I’m sure it’s nothing important. Probably wants some input ahead of the UN speech.’

‘Sweetheart, he has a National Security Advisor for that.’ Tara MacDonald went back to the mirror, but Maggie could see she was not done. ‘Well, ain’t you the insider. And there I was thinking you were just an NSC staffer.’

Maggie ignored the remark, staring at the mirror, aware that she had already been here a minute – which was a minute longer than she should have been. Besides, she had heard this kind of barb before.

The face that stared back at her looked pale and strained: no surprise, really, given the excruciating little scene that had just been played out in the Chief of Staff’s office. In the panicked dash to get here this morning she’d forgone her usual lick of paint: there had simply been no time to apply concealer to the dark shadows beneath her eyes or the tinted moisturizer that did its best to conceal the tiny crows’ feet that now perched at the corners of her eyes along with the cigarette-lines around her mouth. Just a touch of mascara and a sweep of nude lipstick was all she’d managed, and it showed. Not much evidence at the moment of what the gossip column of the City Paper had recently referred to as ‘the delectable Maggie Costello’.

After yet another attempt to restore swift order to her hair, she headed off – walking as fast as she could without triggering a security alert – through the press briefing room and then outside along the colonnade towards the White House Residence, home for little more than two months to Stephen Baker, wife Kimberley, their thirteen-year-old daughter Katie and eight-year-old son, Josh.

The Secret Service agents ushered her through without so much as a question, clearly expecting her. Through one set of doors, then another and suddenly she was in what looked like any other American household at ten past eight in the morning. There were cereal boxes on the table, school bags spilling over with gym kit on the floor, and childish chatter in the air. Except for the minor matter of armed officers posted outside the door and state-of-the-art, encrypted communications equipment in every room, it looked like a regular family home.

Stephen Baker was not at the table scouring The New York Times over his half-moon reading glasses as she was expecting. Instead he was standing in the middle of the kitchen, jacket off, with an apple in his hand. Standing opposite him, three yards away and staring intently, was his son Josh – clutching a baseball bat.

‘OK,’ the President whispered. ‘You ready?’

The little boy nodded.

‘Here it comes. Three, two, one.’ He tossed the apple, slowly and at just the right height for it to make contact with the little boy’s bat.

Struck firmly, the fruit went flying past the President’s hand and splattered into the wall behind him.

A voice came from the next room, raised to full volume. ‘Josh! What did I say about ball games inside?’

The President made a mock-worried expression for the benefit of his son and then, conspiratorially, put his finger to his lips. In full voice he called out, ‘All under control, my love,’ as he retrieved the apple from the floor and wiped the pulp from the wall. Then, catching the eye of the Secret Service agent who had witnessed the entire episode, he mouthed, ‘You too. Not a word.’

Even here, without the trappings and grandeur of office, he was a striking man. Six foot three, with a full head of brown hair, he was always the first person in the room you noticed. He was lean, his features fine and sharp. But it was his eyes that grabbed you. They were a deep, penetrating green and – even when the rest of him was animated and quick – they seemed to operate at a slower pace, gazing levelly, never darting. During the TV debates, the camera seemed to seek them out, as if it were as mesmerized as the audience. When commentators wrote about Candidate Baker exuding calm and steadiness, Maggie was convinced it was not his answers or policy ideas they had in mind. It was his eyes.

And now they were looking towards her. ‘Hey Josh, look who’s here. Your favourite Irish aunt.’

‘Hi Maggie.’

‘Hi Joshie. How’s your new school?’

‘S’OK. I play baseball, which is cool.’

‘That is cool.’ Maggie was beaming. Josh Baker was a contender for America’s cutest boy and having first met him nearly two years ago she felt as if she had almost seen him grow up.

That first encounter had come on a summer Saturday in Iowa, at the State Fair in Des Moines. Stephen Baker had been there with his family – Josh, then aged six, kept nagging to ride on the bumper cars – as the candidate tried to endear himself to the ever-discerning, and crucial, people of Iowa. Baker was then the rank outsider in the Democratic field, the little-known governor of Washington State. His name recognition was zero, he had no national experience and carried no regional advantage: historically, Democrats liked governors from the South who might deliver a chunk of votes that would otherwise be hard to reach. Washington State? In a presidential primary, that counted as a disability.

Still, Rob – Maggie’s old pal from her Africa days, who had ended up in the State Department and had just dealt the death-blow to her nascent career – had been insistent. ‘Just meet him,’ he had said. ‘You’ll know right away.’

Maggie had stonewalled, resisting, refusing to be swayed by the barrage of calls, emails and texts that followed. Maggie Costello? Working for a politician? The idea was ridiculous. She had ideals, for God’s sake, and ideals had no place in the snakepit of modern politics. The young Maggie Costello had had nothing but contempt for politicians. She’d seen what they and other power-seekers had done to godforsaken bits of Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East, first as an aid-worker, latterly as a behind-the-scenes diplomat. It sounded corny, but as far as she was concerned there was only one mission that mattered: trying to make the world a better place, especially for those on the sharp end of war, disease and poverty. The way she saw it, politicians tended, at best, to get in the way of that process; at worst to profit by others’ disadvantage.

Besides, she’d argued to Rob, the election was more than a year away; Baker’s candidacy was just a few months old and the Beltway wisdom had already written him off as an also-ran. They suspected he was running as a future vice president, trying to get himself noticed. The only poll she had seen gave him a score of ‘negligible’, too small to measure. And anyway, what did she know about US presi dential politics?

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Rob had insisted. ‘You know foreign policy. He’s governor of Nowheresville: the closest he gets to foreign policy is having lunch at the International House of Pancakes. Just go, just meet him and you’ll see what I mean. He’s different: he’s something special.’

So, sighing inwardly, she had gone to the Iowa State Fair and watched Baker mingling with the hog-farmers, eventually crowning a giant pig the winner of the hotly-fought Big Boar Contest. ‘He’s bigger than I am, he’s better looking – why isn’t he running for president?’ Baker had said to delighted cheers. She waited before introducing herself. She wanted to see him in action.

It didn’t take long to see he was a natural. His manner was easy, his interest in people shone through as genuine, not the synthetic sincerity of the blow-dried, bleached-teeth politicians usually deemed presidential material. Unlike most candidates, he knew there was a difference between listening and staying silent while you wait to speak again. He actually listened. And whatever quality it was that had won over her cynical friend, Rob, it seemed to be working on the usually wary folk of Des Moines – people who had grown sceptical of the procession of suitors who invaded their state every four years smiling brightly with their faces aimed towards the television cameras, making promises they never kept. Baker, on the other hand, had the crowd in his thrall: they watched him eagerly, mirroring his expressions, grinning when he grinned, reflecting back the warmth they felt from him. And unlike other candidates, who seemed to have been parachuted into such events from another planet, he genuinely seemed to be enjoying himself, making real human contact with the people around him, rather than using them as props for a photo opportunity.

Finally she stepped up to say hello.

‘So you’re the woman who brought peace to the Holy Land,’ he had said, wiping an oily hand on his apron as he paused from flipping chops on the outdoor grill beside the Iowa Pork Producers’ tent. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you.’

‘Nearly,’ she had replied. ‘Nearly brought peace.’

‘Well, nearly’s a hell of a lot further than anyone ever got before.’

They snatched moments of conversation as he shook more hands, posed for camera-phone snaps or exchanged banter with a local reporter. He would break off – to admire a life-sized cow made entirely of butter or to have a bumper car ride with Josh – then pick up exactly where they had left off.

Eventually he asked her to hop in the car that would take them to his next event, an evening speech in Cedar Rapids. Kimberley and the kids would be in the back; she could ride with him up front. When she looked puzzled as to how there would be room, he smiled. ‘I have the most crucial job on the “Baker for President” campaign: I’m the driver.’

They talked for the entire two-hour journey, until the three Bakers in the back were fast asleep, the children’s heads resting on their mother’s shoulders. He listened as much as he talked. He wanted to know how she had started, asking her more about the work she had done as a volun teer in Africa, straight after graduation, than about the high-level shuttle diplomacy that had made her name in Jerusalem. ‘You don’t want to know this,’ she had said eventually, with an embarrassed wave of the hand.

‘No, I really do. Here’s why. You know who I’m going to be in this campaign? I’m going to be the hick. “The logger’s son from Aberdeen, Washington”.’

‘But that’s one of your great strengths. You’re the American Dream.’

‘Yeah, yeah. The folks like that. But I’m running against Doctor Anthony Adams, PhD of New York. I’m the boy from the sticks. I’ve got to convince Georgetown and The New York Times and the Council on Foreign Relations – all that crowd – that I’m not too provincial to be President.’

‘I thought you wanted to be the outsider: Mr Smith goes to Washington and all that.’

‘No, Maggie. I want to win.’

Soon he was telling her how, once he’d got a scholarship to Harvard, he’d met people who spent the vacations in Paris or London or jetted off for weekends in the Caribbean. He, meanwhile, had to go back to Aberdeen and work shifts in the lumber yard or at the frozen fish processing plant: his father had emphysema and there was no other way to pay the bills.

‘Eventually I got away. My first trip out of the country. And I went to Africa. Just like you.’

He looked away from the road long enough for them to smile at each other.

‘I was in Congo, Zaire as it was then. Jeez, I saw some terrible things. Just terrible. And it’s still going on, if not there, then somewhere else. It’s like they’re taking turns: Rwanda, then Sierra Leone, then Darfur. The burning villages, the rapes, the children orphaned. Or worse.’ He glanced at her again. ‘I know you’ve seen some real horror yourself, Maggie.’

She nodded.

‘Well, it’s a long time ago now.’ He paused for a long minute until she wondered if she was meant to say something. Then he spoke. ‘I believe I can win this thing, Maggie. And if I do, I want to do something that only an American president can do. I want to dedicate some of the enormous resources of this country to stopping all this killing.’

She frowned.

‘I’m not talking about sending our army to invade places. We tried that already. It didn’t work out so well.’ Now it was her turn to smile. ‘We need to think of other ways to do it. That’s why I need you.’ He let that sentence hang in the air while she stared at him in disbelief.

‘Something tells me that you never forgot what you saw when you were twenty-one, Maggie. You never forgot it. It’s what makes you work so hard, even now, all these years later. Am I right?’

Maggie looked out of the car window, picturing the position papers, conferences and endless meetings of which her life now consisted. Each day she felt she got further away from that angry twenty-one-year-old woman she had once been. But he was right. What fuelled her still was the fury she had felt then about all the violence and injustice – all the sorrow – in the world and the determination to do something about it. These days, her ideals seemed to have slipped so far into the distance, it was a struggle to glimpse them. But Stephen Baker had just reminded her that they were still there. She turned back to him and nodded.

‘And that’s how I am, too. I never forgot what I saw out there. And about eighteen months from now, I’m going to have a chance to do something about it. Something big.’ He shifted the car down a gear. ‘Will you be with me, Maggie Costello?’

Now, nearly two years later, the President was reaching for a red plastic lunch box with one hand and opening the fridge with the other. ‘So what’s it to be, junior? Apple or pear?’

‘Can’t I have candy?’

‘No, young man, you cannot. Apple or pear?’

‘Apple.’

Stephen Baker wheeled around, an expression of deep seriousness on his face. ‘That’s not so you can use it to play baseball, is it?’

The boy smiled. ‘No, Dad.’

‘Josh.’

‘I promise.’

The President put the fruit into the box, clipped the top shut then placed it in his boy’s hand. Then he bent to kiss his son on the top of his head. Maggie noticed that he shut his eyes as he did it, as if in a moment of grateful prayer. Or just to savour the smell of Josh’s hair.

‘OK, young man, scram.’

Just then, Kimberley Baker came in, clutching a bag bulging with gym gear. Blonde and pretty as a peach in her college days, she was now usually described as ‘rounded’ or, by the less kind, ‘plump’. Magazines had obsessed about her weight when her husband first announced, the celebrity press zooming in on cellulite patches or a close-up of her rear-end in an ill-advised trouser-suit. She had gone on daytime TV, told how she had gained weight when Katie was born and how she had tried multiple diets – ‘including all the nutty ones!’ – to take the pounds off, but failed each time. Now, she said, she was comfortable with who she was and had decided to devote her energies to something more worthwhile than her waist size. The women in the audience had stood and cheered their approval, the host had hugged her and, within a day or two, she was declared a role model for female empowerment.

No less important, the political cognoscenti had decided that Kimberley Baker was an enormous asset to her husband. Female voters, in particular, had long been sceptical of Barbie doll, Stepford political wives; they liked what it said about

Stephen Baker that his wife was a real, rather than arti ficially flawless, woman. That she was from Georgia, thereby connecting him with the vote-rich South, was an added bonus.

The Bakers could not say they were used to life in the White House, even if Tara MacDonald had already briefed People magazine that they were loving it. But Kimberley was certainly making an effort, chiefly for the children’s sake. She had been worried about it from the start, anxious about an eight-year-old boy and a thirteen-year-old girl entering the most vulnerable time in their young lives in front of the gaze of the entire world. She remembered her own adolescence as one long stretch of blushing embarrassment: the notion of enduring that with a battery of cameras permanently in your face, scrutinizing your clothes and your hair and relaying those images around the globe, seemed truly unbearable. During the campaign, Stephen Baker always got a laugh when he joked that the only two people who truly wanted him to lose the election were his opponent and his wife.

Now Kimberley was fussing over both Josh and her shy, gauche, pretty teenage daughter, bundling them out of the door and into the hands of a casually-dressed, twenty-something woman who looked like an au pair. In fact, she was Zoe Galfano, one of a Secret Service detail whose sole duty was the protection of the Baker children.

‘Maggie, something to drink? Coffee, hot tea, juice?’

‘No thanks, Mr President. I’m fine.’ The phrase still snagged in her throat on its way out, but there was no getting around it. Everyone addressed him the same way, including his closest advisors and oldest friends, at least inside the White House. He had realized early on in the job that if he asked some people to call him by his first name, then those to whom he had not made the same offer would

feel offended. He’d end up telling everyone, ‘Call me Stephen,’ and that was too casual. Better to keep it formal – and consistent.

He checked his watch. ‘I want to talk about Africa. I saw your paper. The killing’s starting up again in Sudan; there’s hundreds of thousands at risk in Darfur. I want you to work up an option.’

Maggie’s mind started revving hard. Magnus Longley was all but certain to take her job away, and yet here was the President offering the opportunity she had always dreamed of. The timing was perverse – and painful. But she felt a rush of the same optimism that had always got her into trouble – and also got things done. She took a deep breath. Perhaps, somehow, the whole Asshole Adams debacle would melt away.

‘An option, for action?’ she asked.

Baker was about to reply when a head popped around the doorframe. Stu Goldstein, Chief Counselor to the President: the man who had masterminded the election campaign, the man who occupied the most coveted real estate in the White House, the room next door to the Oval Office. The veteran of New York City political combat who stored a million and one facts about the politics of the United States in a phenomenal brain atop a wheezing, morbidly obese body.

‘Mr President. We need to go across to the Roosevelt Room. You’re signing VAW in two minutes.’ A small turn of the head. ‘Hi Maggie.’

Baker took his jacket off the back of a kitchen chair and swung his arms into it. ‘Walk with me.’

The instant he began moving she could see the Secret Service agents alter their posture, one whispering into his lapel, ‘Firefly is on the move.’ Firefly, the codename allocated to Baker by the Secret Service. The bloggers had been kept busy for a week, deconstructing the hidden meaning of that one.

‘What kind of options are you after, Mr President?’

‘I want something that will get the job done. There’s an area the size of France that’s become a killing field. No one can police that on the ground.’ As they walked, a pair of agents hovered close by, three paces behind.

‘So you’re talking about the air?’

He looked Maggie in the eye, fixing her in that cool, deep green. Now she understood.

‘Are you suggesting we equip the African Union with US helicopters, Mr President? Enough of them to monitor the entire Darfur region from the sky?’

‘It’s like you always said, Maggie. The bad guys get away with it because they think no one’s looking. And no one is looking.’

She spoke slowly, thinking it through. ‘But if the AU had state-of-the-art Apaches, with full surveillance technology – night vision, infra-red, high-definition cameras – then we could see exactly who’s doing what and when. There’d be no place to hide. We could see who was torching villages and killing civilians.’

‘Not “we”, Maggie. The African Union.’

‘And if people know they’re being watched-’

‘They behave.’

Maggie could feel her heart racing. This was what anyone who had seen the massacres in Darfur had been praying for for years: the ‘eye in the sky’ that might stop the killing. But the African Union had always lacked the wherewithal to make it happen: they didn’t have the helicopters to monitor the ground below, and so the killers had been free to slaughter with impunity. Now here was the American President vowing to give them the tools the dead and dying had been crying out for. The spark of excitement was turning into a flame – until she remembered that she was about to lose her job.

‘We only have very narrow majorities in the House and Senate, sir. Do you think-’

He smiled, the wide, bright smile of a confident man. ‘That’s my job, Maggie. You give me some options.’

By now they had arrived in the West Wing, standing in the corridor just outside the Roosevelt Room. An aide tried and failed to hand him a text, another stepped forward and reminded him who was in the front row and needed to be acknowledged. A third leaned forward and applied four precise dabs of face powder for the sake of the TV cameras. Someone asked if he was ready and he nodded.

The double doors were opened and an unseen tenor voice bellowed out the words that were simultaneously thrilling and wholly familiar.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States!’